John Rowe still flies to Amsterdam for research meetings. He is 82.
A gerontologist and former chief executive of the health insurer Aetna, Rowe now spends his time as a professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, studying the very phenomenon he is living. “Is this the new 82?” he asks. “For people like me, it is.”
That question, though, is becoming even more relevant to a much younger generation of professionals. As lifespans stretch toward 100, workers will have to get their heads around a novel idea: The standard career, with its three tidy acts of education, work and retirement, is over. In its place is something messier—and trickier to navigate: a 60-year career that might stretch from a person’s early 20s into his or her late 70s or 80s, with pivots, reinventions and time off built in rather than treated as failures.
This workforce shift isn’t evenly distributed. Rowe’s own research has found that “active life expectancy,” the years lived without significant disability, has lengthened mainly among the affluent. “When we are talking about the 60-year career, we are talking about educated people at higher income levels,” he says. “They have more assets and opportunities.”
Nevertheless, most American workers today are looking at living a decade longer than their parents—79 years, on average, compared with 71 in 1970, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and many either don’t want to retire or won’t have the financial means to do so. Those workers are going to have to figure out how to make sure their longer working lives are both productive and meaningful.
What will that new career road map look like? Here’s how younger workers might think about a professional journey that could extend well into their 80s.
Entry level: Cast a wide net
For people in their 20s and 30s, longevity researchers agree that early success is less about choosing the perfect first job or profession than about developing a tolerance for changing course, a skill a 60-year career will demand repeatedly.
Lynda Gratton, a professor at London Business School and co-director of its Sari Foundation Institute for Work, Longevity and Careers, argues that young professionals need to view their early career as a series of data-gathering experiments. Rather than treating an initial role as a long-term commitment, young workers should focus on continuous learning through constant trial-and-error and collaboration.
To put that into practice, employees should actively seek out new learning opportunities, whether by raising a hand for cross-departmental initiatives, taking on client-facing roles alongside technical work or testing different organizational cultures while personal and financial obligations are relatively light.
“They have to be learning, not necessarily at university, but through talking to colleagues so they understand what work actually is, and can imagine themselves in their roles,” Gratton says.
Martha Deevy, a senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity, says this experimental phase should focus on understanding human behaviors rather than short-lived technical trends. That means, for instance, taking on responsibilities that build negotiation and communication skills.
“What serves young people throughout a 60-year career are portable ‘soft’ skills, like relationship-building, complex problem-solving, collaborative work and managing group dynamics,” Deevy says.
Experts caution against betting too heavily on any single “hot” skill. Five years ago, Gratton says, the safe advice was to learn to code; now, not so much. More recently, medical students were warned away from radiology because of artificial intelligence, a field now in high demand again. The lesson, then, isn’t so much to guess correctly about infinite unknowns in the future, but to stay adaptable enough that the guess doesn’t matter as much. Those soft skills will serve you for life.
Then there’s the financial side of longer careers. For as long as there has been retirement, the advice has been to start saving early, to take advantage of compounding interest. Some people do it, some don’t. But with lifespans increasing, this age-old advice is more crucial than ever, because it will provide both a retirement fund as well as a transition fund that will allow workers to take calculated risks in midlife or later—be that a pay cut for a career pivot, a sabbatical fund or tuition fees for midcareer reskilling.
Midcareer: Network and reskill
By the time professionals reach their 40s and 50s, Gratton argues, they typically hold more accumulated expertise and a wider professional network than at any earlier point in their lives—exactly the foundation needed to keep a career thriving. Yet traditionally, this is the time workers often treat their career as a plateau, or wait to be pushed out by market shifts.
When thinking about a 60-year career, though, this should be the decade to actively reskill, explore new models of work and prepare for the decades ahead. “In your 40s and 50s, you shouldn’t say, I’m not investing in my career, I don’t know how much time I’ve got left,” Gratton says. “It’s roughly the same number of years you’ve already worked.”
That proactive mindset is critical because landing a traditional corporate role late in a career remains notoriously difficult.
Herminia Ibarra, a professor at London Business School who studies career transitions, says that workers often discover this reality “only after bumping their heads up against that wall.” The key, she argues, is to treat midcareer not as a time to hover in a holding pattern, but as an opportunity to build alternative runways, whether that means moving to a smaller firm, joining a consulting practice or launching a business of their own.
This isn’t easy. Gratton’s research shows that the 40s and 50s are frequently the most overcrowded decades of a modern career, as professional responsibility, financial pressure and family caregiving demands peak all at the same time. That leaves almost no mental space for the reflection a major transition requires. “We encourage adventure at 20,” Gratton says, “but we discourage it at 40 and 50.”
To keep options open during these demanding years, Ibarra recommends two essential practices that should run alongside a busy job. First, pursuing a side project or structured hobby prevents what Ibarra calls the “work-role merger,” the dangerous fusing of one’s identity entirely with a single employer or job title. “Skip the side project, and your sense of identity remains entirely dependent on one employer,” Ibarra cautions.
Second, professionals should actively protect loose connections, as a network naturally degrades if neglected. “If you lose your network, you lose the very thing a later transition depends on,” Ibarra says.
Even if your schedule leaves no room for side projects or networking, you likely have built up enough goodwill and status to request a modest amount of time off, say three or four weeks, even if it is unpaid. The goal is to get enough distance from the daily grind to think more strategically about what you might want to do next. “If you’re working on a treadmill, it is really hard to be calm and to think about future goals,” Gratton says.
Companies today don’t make any of this simple, as they rarely offer sabbaticals or internships for older workers. But that may change. As Stanford’s Center on Longevity points out in a report, corporate culture desperately needs to create midcareer scaffolding, such as structured midlife internships, reskilling sabbaticals and formal gap years, which match what is routinely offered to 22-year-olds. But until institutions catch up, midcareer professionals must build that infrastructure for themselves.
Late career: Stay relevant, keep in touch
Few experts suggest that working in your 60s, 70s and 80s will mean maintaining those 50-hour weeks. For some people, that may be fine. But if 70 is the new 50, it means that this will be the time to transition from day-to-day responsibilities to more advisory roles, flexible work and meaningful contributions to organizations who value experience.
The primary rule for staying in the workforce into your 80s is resisting technological retreat. “Learn new skills, especially tech,” advises Rowe. Staying current with standard workplace software and tools demonstrates continuing relevance to colleagues.
Some of the same advice for midcareer will remain relevant later, especially staying active in professional associations, rather than letting networks fade as peers retire. This means attending conferences and maintaining recruiter relationships—the kinds of things that people in their late 50s and early 60s too often let lapse when they plan to retire within the decade.
“I kept in touch with search consultants and let them know the specific kinds of board seats and advisory roles I was interested in,” Rowe says of his 70s.
For many professionals at this stage, the goal isn’t climbing higher, but reducing hours while maximizing their impact on organizations. To do that, workers should envision retirement as a phased transition rather than an abrupt end; this can mean negotiating part-time roles, soliciting project-based advisory work or retaining a consulting gig with an employer before stepping away completely.
At the same time, Rowe says, meaningful nonprofit or community work can give an older person purpose. “Volunteering is, in many ways, as valuable as paid work—it is good for your brain and good for your body,” he says. It can also expand your network and lead to even more opportunities.
Gratton, who at 71 recently signed on to run an executive program until age 100, views the later years as some of the richest of a modern life. The relational and intellectual groundwork laid decades earlier pays its ultimate dividend at this age. With planning, and if you remain in good health, Gratton says, “our 70s can be some of the greatest years of our lives.”
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